Shipwreck cargo

This quantitative study of commodity prices examines the
early modern food market, a period and topic widely neglected by
historians owing to a lack of data or palaeographic expertise that has
prompted scholars to turn their attention to later periods. Despite the
ubiquitous presence of fish in European food markets, specialists have
difficulty identifying its consumption levels or price. This paper provides
a wide panorama of qualitative observations about food provisioning
practices and the cost hierarchy of commodities on the French market
from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. We conclude that sea fish
became an affordable alternative source of protein in the general diet.
Our research demonstrates that cod fish occupied a good place on the
French food market, competing successfully against top-selling
commodities such as meat.

After the Pandora’s partly unsuccessful pursuit of the Bounty mutineers through the Pacific islands in 1791, the ship ran aground on a submerged reef and sank 140km east of Cape York, Queensland. Archaeological excavations revealed that the Pandora crew, in addition to their primary objective, made ethnographic material collections during their voyage, including 25 stone adzes and 5 stone pounders. These collected objects are of particular interest because they have escaped the past processes that might have impacted them had they made the journey back to Europe. In archaeological studies, for instance, these adzes were not included in 20th century typological analyses concerned with understanding the initial human migrations into Oceania, or in more recent geoarchaeological research that seeks to understand Polynesian voyaging, social networks and exchanges.
Our paper contextualises the adzes and pounders found on the Pandora to understand the engagement between the European crewmembers and the local people they encountered during their journey through the Pacific Islands. The Pandora crew had participated in the early colonial collecting practices that were foundational to European museum collections and the beginnings of anthropological and archaeological enquiry in the Pacific. On the other hand, the Polynesian participants likely benefited from the engagement in ways that suited their own agendas. We argue that the Pandora objects and similar museum collections as a broader assemblage are important not only for archaeological research, but also because they potentially continue to hold contemporary significance for Polynesian people today and are a legacy that can benefit future generations.

This article examines the links between the timber trade in New Brunswick and Victorian city building in the British Isles. It will do this through the lens of one Irish immigrant family who were engaged in the timber and shipping trades on both sides of the Atlantic. This article will consider the interrelationships between these various strands both at home and abroad and investigate their operation within the broader contexts of an industrial age. While offering insight into the business operations of one merchant family, this essay will discuss the impact of New Brunswick’s lumber trade on the material culture of a growing industrial Britain, particularly during the first half of the nineteenth century.

This paper contends that supply-side factors related to the maritime's industry response to conflicts are quite important in explaining the predominant role of the fur trade in the early economy of Canada. Exports and imports of non-fur industries in Canada tended to be bulky with a low value to weight compared to furs and inputs needed for the fur trade which were of higher value to weight. As a result, shipowners – when assuming the higher transport costs induced by warfare – preferred not to ship low-value-to-weight goods and reorganized their cargo compositions to ship high-value-to-weight goods. Both the inputs and the outputs of non-fur industries tended to be low-value-to-weight, which was not the case for the fur trade. The result is that war meant important increases in costs for non-fur industries and important reductions in demand for their goods. The frequency of wars acted to depress the output of non-fur industries.

The HMS St George was a second rate ship-of-the-line of the Royal Navy. She sank, together with the HMS Defence, in the North Sea off the Jutland coast in 1811, with nearly all of her crew lost the tragedy claimed 1400 lives. The ship was excavated during the 1980’s and a museum dedicated to the wreckage opened in 1993 in Thorsminde. Several theses have been written in past years about artefacts from the HMS St George at the University of Southern Denmark. This thesis examines the collection of navigational instruments recovered from the wreck and reflects on the culture of navigation onboard the ship. It re-examines the history of the St George’s last voyage with regards to Gibbs’ theory on site formation processes.

For almost a century the staple theory of Harold Innis has been the most influential historical approach in Canada. This article reviews the major 18th and 19th trades and establishes that the assumption these "losing" trades were the motor of the economy is wrong on both fronts. It then explains the popularity of this historically inaccurate theory in terms of pragmatic empiricism, the advanced capitalist historical theory and method most favoured in the Anglo-American academy.

Australia's trade links with Asia go back a very long way. The Macassans, from what is now Indonesia, were exploiting the natural resources of Northern Australia and exchanging material with the Aboriginal people for many years before Europeans ventured into Australian waters. Soon after the convict settlement was established at Port Jackson, trade began with Batavia (Indonesia), China, India and other ports in the Asia-Pacific region.

As early as 1793, Calcutta-based British merchants began to send vessels to Sydney with cargoes of beef, pork, sugar, rice and other goods. Not only much needed food arrived but also spirits such as rum - which quickly became established as a form of currency in the colony. In November 1796, Campbell, Clark and Company of Calcutta dispatched a speculative cargo on board a vessel which it renamed Sydney Cove to commemorate its first trading venture with the new settlement.

"Maritime historians, archaeologists and curators all seek to interpret and 'present' the way in which people lived in past times to people in the present day. Yet each of these parent disciplines has a slightly different approach and seeks to utilise different sources to meet this goal. Maritime museums, for example, are most comfortable with curators who acquire objects and develop exhibitions and are used to dealing with museum collections rather than archaeological collections. Archaeologists, on the other hand, frequently excavate and seek information from a slightly different kind of 'material culture'. Historians are often intrigued by the whole concept of 'material culture', but have difficulty applying it to their histories, which instead draw primarily on text-based sources, and to a lesser extent the images beloved by art historians.

Is this simply a question of 'labelling' or are there more fundamental differences in these ways of addressing the past? This paper will discuss these issues from the perspective of a historian running the maritime archaeology programme at the Australian National Maritime Museum. "

The wreck site of a mid-19th century trading vessel, later identified as the William Salthouse, was discovered by divers in August 1982. Staff of the Maritime Archaeological Unit inspected the site in December 1982 and it was declared a historic shipwreck on 22 December 1982. During March and April 1983 a five week test excavation was carried out on the site to obtain information about the ship's cargo, methods of stowage, and to produce an overall site plan.
The William Salthouse was the first large vessel to sink inside Port Phillip Bay, just five years after the settlement of the region, and was the first recorded trading vessel ever to voyage direct from Canada to any Australia port.

"What has been learned from the detailed study of cargo material found on merchant shipwreck sites in Australia? Some extensive collections of shipwreck cargo material have resulted from archaeological excavations by maritime archaeologists over the past 30 years or so. Other collections have been created by SCUBA divers, primarily before the introduction of the Commonwealth (Federal) Historic Shipwrecks Act in 1976. Many of these have now been documented as a result of the 1993 amnesty. The relationship between cargo artifacts from archaeologically excavated shipwrecks and similar artifacts found on terrestrial historical archaeological sites is explored through a consideration of the meanings attached to these objects, suggesting ways that artifact studies focused on shipwreck cargo material can contribute to understandings of colonial societies, the nature of capitalism, and the rise of consumerism.

This journal article argues that successful colonial settlement was only possible where there was a regular supply of suitable consumer goods for the newly arrived colonists."

This paper emphasises the importance of shipwreck cargoes in the study of artefacts where both the date of the wreck and nature of the cargo are well documented. The sample is small, and the results preliminary, but the study also serves as a reminder of the value of standard reference works in artefact description. The author was then in charge of the Historical Archaeology Unit at the Victoria Archaeological Survey.

William Salthouse is one of Victoria’s oldest and most intact shipwrecks. Shortly after its discovery, the site was looted and suffered rapid erosion. Initial attempts at in situ stabilisation failed, but the placement of artificial Cegrass™ on the site was an immediate success. The site has been stable for the past 12 years; however a dive in September 2008 unexpectedly discovered deep scours in the sandbank. The current condition of the site has been assessed in relation to changing local environments and the continued use of a permit only access system for divers to the site.

The William Salthouse was the first merchant vessel to sail with a cargo of merchandise from the British Dominion of Canada to the newly established colonies of Australia. The vessel was lost on 27 November 1841 while attempting to enter Port Phillip Heads during a voyage from Montreal and Quebec to Melbourne. Historical and archaeological research has revealed that much of the cargo of salted meats and fish was contained in casks (or barrels) which were the most common containers for shipment of bulk commodities during the first half of the nineteenth century. Many of the casks were marked with information about their origin, weight and contents. Other components of the cargo included alcohol in bottles and casks. This paper discusses aspects of the cargo in light of the social and economic context for trade between Canada and Australia at the time.

This book chapter considers some of the significant artifact studies that have been conducted in Australian maritime archaeology over the last two decades. It will examine what has been learnt from the detailed study of artifacts from Royal Navy vessels as well as cargo material, personal objects and so-called "collected" items found on shipwreck sites as well as artifact studies associated with jetty sites. It will briefly explore the relationship between artifacts from wrecks and similar artifacts found on terrestrial historical archaeological sites primarily by considering the meanings of these objects. It will suggest some ways that artifact studies can contribute to our understandings of trade, colonial societies and even site formation processes.

"Early colonial economies in North America and Australia were commonly based on a combination of the importation of goods and a system of local production which included subsistence agriculture and hunting. Before 1850 the Australian settlements had a very limited and only slowly developing capacity to create or harvest, local supplies of food and alcohol. Furthermore in the nineteenth century the Australian colonies never developed the capacity to produce certain kinds of consumer goods. In the Australian contact the period and degree of "dependency" on external sources of supply varied according to well recognised factors like the growth of population and establishing or importing the means of production to the colony.

This book chapter considers trade between Canada and Australia through an examination of the voyage of the William Salthouse in what was the earliest attempt to establish trade relations between Canada and Australia."

Casks were the most common containers for the shipment of bulk commodities during the nineteenth century. Cooperage, the trade of making casks, has declined during the twentieth century to the point where two of the three branches of the trade have ceased to exist. The remains of the cask cargo found on the wreck of the William Slathouse provided an opportunity to study cooperage technology, the making of casks, cask contents and stowage methods in a nineteenth century sailing vessel. This paper discusses some of the results obtained during a short test excavation of the wrecksite in 1983.

By comparing the archaeological evidence with the historical document it has been possible to demonstrate the use of sub-standard components and poor quality workmanship. The increasing need for legislation to regulate standards and to ensure quality control is discussed.